Artwork by On Kawara. Contributions by Henning Weidemann.

Published by Walther König, Köln.Edited with text by Akiko Bernhöft. Text by Mario Kramer, Jonathan Watkins.

This limited-edition facsimile documents On Kawara’s (1932–2014) Pure Consciousness series, in which he created a new picture every day from January 1 to 7, 1997. The booklets accompanying their exhibition, with installation photos and texts by the artist, are extremely rare; it is reproduced for this publication and packaged in a box designed by Kawara.

Published by Ludion.Introduction by Joost De Clercq, Tommy Simoens. Text by Jonathan Watkins.

On Kawara (1932–2014) is one of the most important and most radical artists of our time. His oeuvre is consumed with time and place, and he has produced a body of work that is dizzying in its simultaneous temporal breadth and rigorous specificity. On Kawara: 1966 focuses on Kawara’s creations from 1966, the year he began work on his famous Today series of date paintings. Kawara created more than 2,000 date paintings in total, in more than 100 different cities, using folders to accurately keep track of his work, with a smear of the paint he used for each painting, the newspaper headlines for that day along with notes about the painting’s format.On Kawara: 1966, published to accompany the last exhibition Kawara collaborated on before his death, documents the artist’s work and his extraordinary personal archive for that year.

Because of his recourse to language, photography and systems of information, On Kawara is often described as a key figure in the history of Conceptual art. Yet his work stands apart in its devotion to painting and its existential reach. On Kawara — Silence is published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Kawara's post-1964 work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Like the exhibition itself, the structure of the book was devised in close collaboration with the late artist. The exhibition catalogue contains essays on Kawara's work by leading scholars and critics in various fields, including art history, literary studies and cultural anthropology. It also includes substantial, authoritative descriptions of every category of his production—the first time such comprehensive information has appeared in print. Richly illustrated, On Kawara — Silence reproduces many examples of the Date Paintings (Today), calendars (One Hundred Years and One Million Years), postcards (I Got Up), telegrams (I Am Still Alive), news cuttings (I Read), maps (I Went) and lists (I Met) that comprised the artist's practice beginning in the mid-1960s. Among other groups of works, the book includes images of the 97 Date Paintings (accompanied by their newspaper-lined storage boxes) that Kawara produced during a three-month run of daily painting in 1970. The catalogue also contains reproductions of paintings and drawings produced in Paris and New York in the years that precede the works for which Kawara is best known, as well as rare images of materials related to his working process. The volume is published in four differently colored covers. Text by Jeffrey Weiss, Daniel Buren, Whitney Davis, Maria Gough, Ben Highmore, Tom McCarthy, Susan Stewart and Anne Wheeler.On Kawara was born in Japan in 1933. During the 1950s he was a prominent member of the postwar Tokyo avant-garde, producing figurative work in a late-Surrealist style. Kawara left Japan in 1959, traveling to Mexico City, Paris and New York, where he settled in 1964. By 1966 he had devoted his work solely to the schematic representation of time and place through calendars, maps, lists, postcards and telegrams. Kawara's primary body of work, which occupied him until his death in 2014, is the Today series, a sequence of paintings produced according to strict protocols of size, color and technique. An incessant traveler, the artist produced Date Paintings in 136 cities and various languages.

Published by Ludion.

The Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara (born 1933) has nurtured a fascination with counting and time for more than 40 years now, most famously through the ongoing execution of his famous “date paintings” of the Today series: a daily ritual to conclude only on the day of his death. The first painting in the series was executed in New York on January 4, 1966; since then, On Kawara has carried out the procedure at regular intervals in cities throughout the world, painting each day, month and year in a white sans-serif script against a monochrome background in the language conventions of the country he is in. When not displayed, each painting is stored in a box and accompanied by a local newspaper clipping of the day. Despite numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, Date Painting(s) in New York and 136 Other Cities is the first retrospective of the 45 years of On Kawara’s date paintings. Including over 180 date paintings, the book is divided into two parts: one that covers the complete series of paintings done in New York, and a second that focuses on the series of works done in different locales throughout the world. The result offers a unique insight into the role that place and a life of travel has played in a body of work that has been defined by time and chronology.

Published by JRP|Ringier.Edited by Pierre Huber. Essay by Thierry Davila.

Can you recall what you were doing on April 3, 1990? What about on July 17, 1996? October 23, 1998? In Date Paintings, time itself has become art--art that carries viewers back in time. These black and white paintings are pure realism, the existence of time put in painting, thus rendering the works--up to a certain point--both viewable and readable. The 11 paintings, made by Conceptual artist On Kawara over the course of a decade, allow viewers to complete their reading with personal associations, historical events or academic interpretations. The book, conceived with Kawara himself, is a decidedly different and intimate take on an artist's monograph. In it, Kawara has invented a simple and striking way to make art by taking his time and using the calendar to make a kind of non-individual art work.